[charcircuit]

By that definition literally all investments are ponzis. You buy something hoping that someone else will be willing to buy it from you at a higher price. Oops the cryptocurrency bubble popped. Oops the company went bankrupt and your stocks are worthless. Oops a natural disaster happened and the house and land lose a lot of value. Oops pokemon is no longer popular and all the TCG cards you have become worthless. Oops the government is no more and your treasury bonds are worthless.

Realize that there is always a bubble and take advantage of the bubble while it lasts.

[atleta]

Not really. Company stocks indeed do have an intrinsic value: companies pay dividends. Now they can go bankrupt, sure, but that's an independent issue. Indeed the very fact that they can go bankrupt (in which case your stock will probably be worth 0) shows that they have an intrinsic value.

So, as opposed to BTC, you don't have to buy it in order to sell it to someone else at a higher price. You can hold it and still make a real profit. (As opposed to the price increase, which you'll only realize if/when you do sell.) And since this is the case, it will mostly anchor the price in the long term to the profit (dividend) making capabilities of the stock.

So no, it's not always a bubble. You could argue that 'fiat' money is a ponzi/bubble but that also has intrinsic value (as the issuing central bank/government will stand up for it, e.g. force every merchant to accept it, you can pay taxes in it, etc.). But if you say that gold is a similar ponzi/bubble, then your probably right. While gold also does have intrinsic value (for its usage as a base material e.g. in electronics), its price is, as far as I can understand a lot higher than what that use would guarantee. (We use relatively little compared to how much we keep in safes.)

[charcircuit]

>companies pay dividend

Not all companies do that though. $GOOG has no voting rights nor dividends yet is worth more than $2100. It does literally nothing as far as I can tell, making it useless compared to even something like bitcoin. Despite this, you could have made a lot of money by just buying the stock years ago and selling it now.

>You can hold it and still make a real profit

That would take 33 years to happen with the stock that currently has the highest yield assuming that yield is constant over those 33 years which is probably a bad assumption. Who wants to get a profit 33 years in the future? If I could not resell it, it would be worthless to me.

With cryptocurrency you can also yield farm to make some money while you are just holding by essentially loaning them and having interest paid to you.

[imtringued]

> By that definition literally all investments are ponzis. You buy something hoping that someone else will be willing to buy it from you at a higher price. Oops the cryptocurrency bubble popped. Oops the company went bankrupt and your stocks are worthless.

Stocks aren't ponzis. Companies pay out dividends all the time and sometimes (very rare nowadays) they pay for stock buybacks out of their own pockets from the profit they have accumulated. There is no need for a greater fool because the investment itself is paying out to investors.

>Realize that there is always a bubble and take advantage of the bubble while it lasts.

That's how you get bubbles. People see a chart with unsustainable 300%+ gains and think, if I were to act rationally and sell now, I would lose out on future irrational gains when the bubble goes up to 600%.

If you thought. Hey, I see a bubble with X gains, if I take Y < X gains then I will get very safe money. Say 10% gains on 300% actual gains on Bitcoin. It would be very safe money and it would be rational and you weakened the bubble, but you also just lost out on big gains, so you stop doing the rational thing.

[charcircuit]

>Companies pay out dividends all the time and sometimes (very rare nowadays) they pay for stock buybacks out of their own pockets from the profit they have accumulated

Not, all stocks do that though. I just checked the FAANG stocks and only Apple pays dividends. Even so Apple has a yield of 0.63% That means you have to hold it for almost 159 years to recoup that investment. Meanwhile if you bought a year ago, by now the stock price has doubled which can allow you to recoup your investment because you can sell it to the "greater fool." Eventually dividends go down, the company goes bankrupt, or some other thing happens and you don't want to be the fool holding the bag.

In cryptocurrency there also exists yield farming and buy backs.

>That's how you get bubbles.

There will always be bubbles. It's like a video game. You need to be minmaxing. Find what bubbles currently exist and figure out how to profit off of them.